Proliferation of malware poses a major threat to modern computerized system of all sizes and shapes. Malware has evolved into a powerful instrument for illegal commercial activity, and significant effort is made by its authors to thwart detection by anti-malware products. Malware is used in fraud, espionage, and in other illegal activities. The malware penetrates the computerized system by exploiting its vulnerabilities, or the vulnerabilities of the people operating it. After the malware has penetrated the system, it may attempt to manipulate data, retrieve confidential information, activate malicious functionalities, or the like.
As a result, malware detection is an important branch of cyber security of every system. One long prevailing technique of malware detection is based on manual identification of malware and extraction of identifiable signatures to be used to identify the same malware on different systems. Such solution relies heavily on expert knowledge and on the ability of human experts to manually inspect software, and is thus not scalable.